Many-electron dynamics triggered by massively parallel ionization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new phenomenon called massively parallel ionization in clusters and biomolecules triggered by intense FEL pulses, leading to unique electron spectra shaped by mean-field and binary interactions.

Contribution

It provides an analytical model for the universal electron spectrum resulting from massively parallel ionization and proposes an experimental setup to observe this phenomenon.

Findings

Analytical derivation of the electron spectrum as a convolution of mean-field and binary collisions.

Identification of the spectrum as a universal feature of massively parallel ionization.

Proposal of hydrogen cluster experiments to validate the phenomenon.

Abstract

Massively parallel ionization of many atoms in a cluster or bio-molecule is identified as new phenomenon of light-matter interaction which becomes feasible through short and intense FEL pulses. Almost simultaneously emitted from the illuminated target the photo-electrons can have such a high density that they interact substantially even after photo-ionization. This interaction results in a characteristic electron spectrum which can be interpreted as convolution of a mean-field electron dynamics and binary electron-electron collisions. We demonstrate that this universal spectrum can be obtained analytically by summing synthetic two-body Coulomb collision events. Moreover, we propose an experiment with hydrogen clusters to observe massively parallel ionization.